Thursday, June 8, 2017

stray notes: Mumbling small talk at the wall

Charles Bukowski is some whom very little of his work goes
a very long way. I admire the absence of all unneeded images, and do place
somewhere in the Hemingway league as a writer who can be spare without being
chintzy. That said, his minimalism gets monotonous after awhile, and his
lonely-old-drunk persona, declaring over again and again to speak for the dispossessed
and the marginal, becomes its own sort of sentimentality: the fact that
Bukowski became aware, early on, that his constituency expected certain types
of poems from him forced him, I think, to stylize himself into a corner he
never managed to get out of. Not availing himself of different kinds of writing
made him, finally, a bore. The truth of his loneliness, of his drunkenness,
made him into a patsy for an audience that was too young, by and large, to have
enough life to write their own stories. Bukowski became a one trick pony: his
best material is his earliest, like Henry Miller, and like Miller as well,
became a self parody without knowing it.

Ezra Pound is
out of fashion these days, but I enjoy his adaptations (translations is too
generous a word) of different oriental writers. In fact, I think that before
Pound's adaptations, oriental poets and poetic forms were largely unknown in
the West. I know it's an anthology warhorse, but I love "The River
Merchant's Wife." I just find the way her feelings change towards her
husband throughout the poem so touching--first they're childhood playmates,
then she's a frightened, ignorant bride, then she falls so deeply in love with
him that she longs for her dust to be mingled with his forever.

I also get a kick out of the line "The monkeys make
sorrowful music overhead." The line is almost comic to us, but obviously
monkeys had very different connotations for the Chinese at that time. An
interesting example of cultural differences.Ezra is someone
who has given me eyestrain and headaches in college, something I can't forgive
him for. He didn't give me anything that was remotely connected to the idiomatic
language he idealized, the truly modern voice that was to be of its own time, a
period sans history. It's a totalitarian impulse to try to live outside
history, or to lay claim to its reducible meaning, both matters Pound thought
he adequately limned, but the problem was that his verse is leaden, dressed up
in frankly prissy notions of what The Ancients had been up to aesthetically.
The effect was perhaps a million dollars of rhetoric lavished on ten cents of
inspiration. I didn't like him, I'm afraid.

Unlike Frank O'Hara, dead too young, but with such a large
and full body of brilliant--yes, brilliant--lyric poetry left in his wake.
O'Hara, influenced by some ideas of modernists, got what Pound tried to do
exactly right: he mixed the dictions of High and Low culture in the same
stanzas with an ease that seemed seamless, he juggled references of Art, TV,
movies, jazz , theater along with the zanily euphemized gossip of his love
life, and was able to render complex responses to irresolvable pains of the
heart--and heartbreak is always a close kin to his rapture--in lines that were
swimming in irony, melancholy, crazy humor. This is poet as eroticized
intelligence.

If Pound's poems work for reasons
other than how he wanted them work, fine that can be explicated interestingly
enough with entirely new criteria extraneous to the author's
aesthetic/political agenda, but it begs the question, really. It confirms my
belief that Pound was talking through his hat most of the time. In this case,
based admittedly on my learned dislike of his poetry, I think he gussied up his
theories in order to usurp the critical commentary he knew would follow his
work: no matter what, all critics had to deal with Pound's flummoxing prose
before they could render an assessment, a trick he garnered from Poe, and one
deployed by Mailer, a somewhat more successful artist/philosopher/critic
(though failed poet).

Eliot had better luck combining the two virtues:The Sacred Wood and
some of his other critical assessments have merit as purelycritical exercises, self-contained arguments that don't
require Eliot's work to illustrate the point. Eliot's poems, as well, stand up
well enough without his criticism to contextualize them for a reader who might otherwise
resist their surface allure. The language in both genres is clear and vivid to
their respective purposes.

Pound, again, to my maybe tin-ear, really sounded, in his
verse, like he was trying to live up to the bright-ideas his theories
contained:The Cantos sound desperate in his desire tobe a genius.